Ubuntu
xorg package

Video Problem with ATI Radeon 9700 Pro

Asked by CharlesVGoff

This problem has been driving me nuts for about two weeks. I have an old PC at home that I want to use as a linux box. Linux has been installed on this machine before but not for a couple of years (Fedora Core 4 timeframe). I've tried every version of linux known to man and the only thing I've been able to successfully install is Solaris 10. Fedora, SUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu all have the same problem. Suse 10 and Ubuntu make it to the very end of the install and then when they go to start the actual windowing system the screen goes black and never recovers. Fedora and Red Hat go to a black screen as soon as the graphical installer trys to start. Has there been a change in linux over the last couple of years that would cause this? Would installing in text mode and then installing the manufacturers drivers help? This is a home built machine with an AMD Athlon 3000+ 64bit processor. Like I said, I've had linux running on this machine before.

Thanks

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CharlesVGoff
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Thomas Kluyver (takluyver) said : 		#1

Hi Charles

At a guess, it sounds like a problem with your graphics drivers. What graphics card or chipset does your computer have?

To give the background, both ATI and NVidia release closed-source Linux drivers*, which often have some problems (although not usually as bad as you describe). There are efforts to create open-source drivers for each without their help, but these often have problems of their own. It may be that switching to the other driver would help with your problem.

If you're prepared to go through the text installer, I think it would probably be easier to solve any problems on an installed system than trying it with Live CDs and the like.

*For completeness, I should mention that ATI have become considerably more co-operative in recent years. But as I understand this, it mainly affects new cards.

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CharlesVGoff (charlesvgoff) said : 		#2

Thomas,

Thanks for the help. I actually didn't need to resort to the text installer. By setting the installer mode to "Safe Graphics Mode" I was able to get an install completed. Once Ubuntu was rebooted it detected my ATI card and gave me the option of enabling the proper drivers to turn on all of the 3D capabilities of the card.

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Thomas Kluyver (takluyver) said : 		#3

Excellent, glad you got it working.